A guy flicks through a pile of vinyl records, groups of colleagues converse over fresh juices, a girl takes away a newly bought bouquet of owners, while a barista in the corner hands out an endless number of at whites. This sounds like a typical scene at the city’s hippest market on a Saturday afternoon – but it’s not. This is all taking place in the lobby of a hotel on a regular Tuesday morning. The Ace Hotel in Shoreditch, to be precise.

Since the launch of its first venture in Seattle 15 years ago, the Ace Hotel group has been redefining the hospitality sector – by not behaving like a hotel group, but as a patron of creativity and innovation. “Our hotels are a platform to engage the creative community and the entrepreneurial community in the city,” says Ryan Bukstein, Ace Hotel’s director of public relations and marketing, and the group’s cultural engineer. And just as Ace Hotels have spread from Seattle to Portland, New York, Palm Springs and London, their laid back hipness is seeping into a new generation of authentic hotels that celebrate their local culture and create a new way for travellers to understand a city.

Ace – and localised hotels like them – are redefining the hospitality world, just as the wave of Ian Schrager- pioneered boutique hotels did around the turn of the millennium. These designer hotels, which courted young, jet-set, Wallpaper magazine-reading entrepreneurs, fell upon the glitzy, but somewhat cringe-inducing, formula of starchitect + banging club = supercool hotel. But it’s not so easy for today’s local hotels which look to neighbourhood immersion, creativity and authentic collaborations.